[Tutor] Borrowing restricted code

[Alan Gauld]

On 06/12/2018 00:45, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> So you can see why many organisations are so paranoid about having 
> licences for every line of code they use. Failure to be fully licenced 
> could be *incredibly* time-consuming and expensive if they get into a 
> legal dispute. The only way to win is to avoid getting into a legal 
> dispute in the first place.
> 
> As for what is "not worth prosecuting", there are no copyright police 
> who troll the internet looking for copied lines of code. Nobody is going 
> to be scanning your Github repos looking for infringement (at least not 

Sorry, that's not strictly true. I know of at least two large companies
who have full time teams whose job is to trawl Github, sourceforge
and a few others looking at new checkins for unlicensed use of
corporate code. And one of those teams is not even a technical
team, they are corporate lawyers... And they do prosecute (or at least
threaten to).

> But they're not going to open up your Python folder and demand to see 
> licences for everything or question whether or not you copy code from 
> Stackoverflow without permission.

Again bodies like FAST(*) certainly do that (with police cooperation
of course - they need a search warrant). But they have been known to
litigate and fines of several thousand pounds have been issued to
infringers(?) But FAST is rarely interested in FOSS software its
commercial code they worry about. And usually it's unlicensed
binary code but they will pursue source code infringements if
asked. But having been on the receiving end of a FAST raid its an
unnerving experience (even though they didn't find anything).

(*)I wasn't sure if FAST are still active because I haven't
heard of any big prosecutions for about 10 years but their web
site suggests they are still very much around.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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